A first-person shooter which sold itself as a noir mystery with anthropomorphic mice sounded too good to be true. MOUSE: P.I. For Hire (2026) struck my interest particularly with its 1920s rubberhose animation art style. I was obsessed with Cuphead (2017) after all—giving this a shot seemed like a clear-cut choice. However, I did ponder if its stylistic direction was simply a showy gimmick to hide its flaws, or if this was a true indie shooter gem? After sinking 10 hours into MOUSE, it doesn’t strike me as revolutionary or groundbreaking. It’s just okay.

MOUSE homes in on all the beats of a good noir investigation. Set in the bustling city of Mouseberg, you play as Jack Pepper, a smart-mouthed private detective with a New York accent who’s tracking the whereabouts of a missing magician. You meet drop-dead gorgeous femme fatales that reveal themselves to be, of course, saboteurs who seduce as a method of manipulation. You engage in big, theatrical shootouts with moustached enemies that poise themselves to be full of grandeur through their extensive monologues. Seedy, graffitied streets teeming with cops, bars with patrons who tell ya to fuggedaboutit, kid. Moreover, the cast gives nothing short of top tier performances that balance humour with a grisly noir twist. A pleasant surprise to those who will recognise his voice, long-time industry veteran Troy Baker does a superb job of voicing Jack Pepper. Baker notably has credits as Joel from The Last of Us, Booker DeWitt from BioShock Infinite and so on under his belt. A promising indication.

With every sharp-witted detective comes a complementary clue board rife with photos, evidence and strings connecting them all together. MOUSE introduces you to Pepper’s Office, a central hub you return to after every mission to put together all the clues you’ve collected. It’s certainly interesting on paper, but its execution is where it all starts to fall apart. There isn’t any puzzle-solving at all, the game automatically places the clues in the correct order, so the player doesn’t do anything beyond pressing a single button. It’s the same for level exploration. When confused as to where to go, the game includes a button that directs you to your next objective in the form of a brush dusting off fingerprints. Cute and on theme, but excessive in its guidance. Let us use our brains! For a game strictly centred around a private detective, the lack of depth to these mechanics feels like a massive wasted opportunity.

On the perspective of not drawing out mechanics to its fullest potential, the side quests and minigames are just as much of a letdown. Mouseberg is littered with intriguing characters like Tammy Tumbler (voiced by Camryn Grimes); a young mechanic who upgrades Pepper’s weapons, but the missions they give you don’t evolve above “capture this photo for me” or “pick this item up during this mission”. The rewards you get for completing these quests are coins which can be spent purchasing ammo, newspapers or collectable baseball cards. The issue here is that none of the items you can buy are remotely satisfactory or even fun. You can find ammo for every gun for free and in heaps scattered across each level, and the newspapers are nothing but extra pieces of lore disguised as collectables.

When it comes to wielding guns, though, MOUSE emboldens players to enamour themselves within the chaos. Elemental barrels—fire, ice and acid—are all over the place. The high-octane combat is accentuated even further once you acquire movement abilities like wall-running or grappling around with your tail. Nothing feels more satisfying than double jumping then hurling an acid barrel towards a group of gunmen (or gunmice) whilst in the air. Mouseberg is your playground—the freedom to gun goons down however you choose is where MOUSE is at its best. The game offers over 10 distinctly powerful weapons (including a raygun with a brain as a source of ammo) that players can toy around with and an upgrade tree that increases reload time, damage dealt and a new alternate fire mode for each gun. It is evident this is where Fumi Games put in the most thought and effort. 

The art style, akin to the aforementioned Cuphead, provides a somewhat novel charm to the combat that wears out once the lack of enemy variety hits you like a truck. The action hero fantasy is shattered when you’re nearing the final levels and you’re still tackling enemies that you were fighting 5 chapters ago. At a certain point, the enemies sort of blend into one big blur. The only redeeming trait are the boss fights, which were designed with unique strategies in mind. My favourite of the bunch is the ghost of a guard’s ex-wife, who you defeat by using a flashlight to stun her before shooting her and freeing her spirit. The wonderful bosses are some of the most fun sequences MOUSE has to offer, but the fun is quickly shot down once you’re right back to gunning down the same 3 variants of the “mouse-goon-with-a-gun” enemy.

The juxtaposition between a goofy shooter sandbox with its serious noir themes are a little more than just jarring. It’s hard to immerse yourself into the suaveness of Pepper when the purposefully cartoonish aspects wash out the supposed grittiness of the story. It’s a noir that features kidnappings, assassinations and a crumbling city in the aftermath of a war, yet all of it is restricted to being just pieces of lore that’s laughably easy to miss; a simple background for your gunplay. It doesn’t help that the game is more concerned with overstuffing itself with pop culture references than refining an already great foundation. MOUSE is so self-aware of its genre that it almost possesses a certain kind of too cool for school irony. If you’re not taking your own worldbuilding seriously, why should the players? 

What you ultimately get is a messy shooter that feels like a parody of the noir genre and its legacy, counting on its captivating artistic direction to keep players engaged. You’re in for a ride of disappointment if you go into MOUSE expecting a thrilling story in the veins of Sunset Boulevard (1950), but a damn good time if you’re wanting cheesy jokes and an arsenal of explosive weaponry.